Brauer bids adieu

After four years of steering two local newspapers, the Southwest Journal and Skyway News (the paper currently known as the Downtown Journal), editor David Brauer has left the building.

"It was to get back to certain things in my life," Brauer says, citing no small amount of burnout. "Like, the rest of it."

Perhaps it's the price one pays for overseeing two publications that frequently rose above the amateurish underpinnings that often plague "community" newspapers. The newspapers, which have a combined circulation of roughly 70,000, grew under Brauer's stewardship.

More than that, the publications increasingly offered tireless and thorough coverage of local issues with staffs that could easily conduct their business together inside a phone booth.

"The demands really ratcheted up," Brauer confesses, adding that he also "lost a managing editor" in the last year. "Sometimes when you come into a job that you really love, you don't get the sense for all the juggling you're doing. Then the balls start to drop."

The 46-year-old is a veteran ink-stained wretch around town: He's done stints with the bygone Twin Cities Reader and City Pages, as well as forays into talk radio on KFAN and KSTP-AM. He also concedes that being an editor went against his "reporting background."

"I became a guy in a room, seeing things through my reporters' eyes, which are good eyes, but I'm a community guy, and felt a need to get back to some of that," he notes.

Brauer will continue to moderate Minneapolis Issues, the e-forum dedicated to such a community sensibility. (His role there has earned him the nickname Sheriff Brauer from at least one member of the CP newsroom.)

He posted his announcement there this week, and his boss, Janis Hall, responded in kind, writing that "I could not be
more proud of the work that he has done for us, for his staff, and for the city he calls home. He will be missed."

But aside from that, Brauer is content to pursue a sabbatical of sorts while "my wife and kids still love me."

And he adds, with typical goodwill and somehwat atypical saltiness, that he leaves his post without acrimony. "I don't want to do the PR bullshit, but I don't want to make the impression that my job sucks," Brauer says. "I'm not leaving here mad at my bosses."